Pulitzer Prize (Fiction)

In chains all that was left of freedom was life,
just existence; but to exist without choice was the
same as death.
-Bernard Malamud,
The
Fixer

In this National Book Award and Pulitzer
Prize winner, Bernard Malamud presents a fictionalized account of a
notorious anti-Semitic incident, the arrest and eventual trial, following
a great outcry in the West, of Mendel
Beilis in pre-Revolutionary Kiev. Beilis was accused of murdering
a Christian boy, despite evidence pointing toward the boy's own mother.
After being held from 1911 to 1913, he was finally brought to trial, where
he was exonerated.

In this novel the protagonist is Yakov Bok, a nominally Jewish handyman
("fixer")--nominally because he has abandoned his Jewish beliefs for a
Spinoza influenced kind of "free thinking"--leaves his village after being
cuckolded by his wife. Eventually ending up in Kiev, he one day comes
upon a man collapsed in the street and decides to help him, despite noticing
that he is wearing a Black Hundreds pin (symbol of a vicious anti-Semitic
organization). The man, who turns out to be a local merchant who
was merely drunk, offers Yakov a job managing his brickyard, not realizing
that he is Jewish. Yakov accepts, despite much trepidation, goes
to work under an assumed name, Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev, and moves into
an apartment in an area forbidden to Jews.

Once on the job he runs afoul of : the merchant's daughter, whose sexual
advances he deflects; local boys, who he he chases out of the factory yard;
and the employees, who he warns about stealing bricks. These seemingly
petty disagreements prove to have disastrous results when a local boy is
found murdered, stabbed repeatedly and drained of blood. Yakov, who
the authorities have discovered is Jewish, is accused of committing the
murder as a form of ritual killing to harvest Christian blood for use in
some imagined rites for Passover celebration :

The ritual murder is meant to re-enact the crucifixion
of our dear Lord. The murder of Christian
children and the distribution of their blood among
Jews are a token of their eternal enmity against
Christendom, for in murdering the innocent Christian
child, they repeat the martyrdom of Christ.

The victim is one of the boys that Yakov had chased, and both daughter
and fellow employees are only too willing to give false testimony against
him. The initial prosecutor assigned to the case is relatively friendly,
and obviously skeptical about this theory of the case, but he does not
last long.

His rivals and replacements try with great brutality to wring a confession
from Yakov. In part, they are motivated by an understanding that
the evidence they have against him is terribly inadequate : they are determined
to keep the case from going to trial. Yakov, on the other hand, recognizes
that he if he can just get to a courtroom he has a chance to clear himself,
and Jews generally, of this blood
libel. There follows a harrowing, years-long, battle of wills,
in which Yakov takes on truly heroic dimensions : a simple, non-political,
nonbeliever, is transformed before our eyes into a powerful symbol of resistance
to anti-Semitism, injustice, tyranny and hatred. By the end of the
story he resembles nothing so much as one of the Titans--an Atlas holding
the weight of the world on his own shoulders; a Prometheus, having his
innards picked out by carrion birds every day; or a Sisyphus, futilely
pushing a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every
night. Yakov too seems sentenced by God to bear a punishment for
all mankind, and he too bears up under it with superhuman strength and
transcendent nobility. Superficially then it seems to resemble an
existentialist novel, but Yakov derives his strength, and the story derives
its universality and its power, from his determination to prove his innocence,
a determination which would not matter to an existentialist.

Through the culture-consuming hegemony of the movies, Malamud is today
best remembered for The Natural, but The Fixer is the book
upon which his reputation should rest. It is a great novel; one that
deserves a place on the shelf with the works of George
Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
Arthur
Koestler, and the other great novelists of the Twentieth Century whose
theme was the struggle of the individual against the machinations of the
State and against the soul-destroying ideological pathologies which undergird
totalitarian states.